A lot has been already discussed , spoken and written about VMware on AWS re-invent 2017 announcements , a quick look on the announcements and impact it’s already having in some of my customer discussions ….

VMware Cloud™ on AWS is expanding availability from the U.S. West (Oregon) region to also include the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) region, and includes additional VMware capabilities and support for more AWS services, making it even easier for customers to move, run, and protect mission-critical applications at scale. Customers can now create VMware SDDCs in AWS US East (N. Virginia) region.

DRaaS : This use case is critical for customers , highlighting some of the use cases i see

Customers already using VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and vSphere as their core technology with all their people and process for their Business Continuity and DR.The DR site Hardware is up for maintenance and they don’ t further want to maintain the DR site.This was a perfect use case for this customer, with assessment of moving the DR to VMC , we showed the customer the value of moving the DR,keeping in view of no changes required on their people,process and methodology.

For some of the customers, having only single site and had been in planning phase to add DR , this announcement came at right time.

In my role, i meet diversified customers with different use cases and it feels great to provide our customers the choice.The question of mobility or should i say ” Challenge of Hybrid” for the obvious reasons of

Multiple Machine formats (Across on-prem and off-prem)

Skill-sets and tool chains

Networking and security

Operational Inconsistency

Monitoring and Reporting across the environments

I have been in discussion with a customer for long enough where a use case of application mobility with above technology meet the needs.Customer is into a business which seems huge spikes during festive season like Black Friday,Christmas,New year.Under such scenario, where customer shouldn’t be buying hardware just for this spike, the best approach presented was

The production and dev environment running on VMware and VxBlock (DellEMC’s Converged platform), having Compute blades and Storage.

Production environment needs extensive compute power and the best possible approach for this customer was to move the dev environment to VMC (VMware on AWS) as the festive season approaches .

This gives production environment all the compute for expansion.

This approach was presented to customer with a assessment report based on the outcomes,cost of running dev at VMC during the time-frame https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2017/08/vmc-assessment-with-vrbc.html VMC assessment helped customer to identify the costs of migrating dev applications clusters / VMs from private cloud to AWS. Above screenshot provides an example of the overview on the assessment giving customer the end-state of VMC . A minimum of four hosts is required for VMware Cloud on AWS. Blue region on the hosts indicates the utilization level for the workloads to be migrated. The monthly costs for VMware Cloud on AWS are shown both in terms of utilization and total purchase costs. 1-year and 3-year subscription costs are added to the VMC assessment to help customers make informed decisions.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhCvGVtEdDc

Along with the VMware Cloud on AWS costs, the private cloud costs are shown with respect to actual and standard utilization. Standard utilization is based on running the infrastructure at optimal levels.

I would be further extending the use cases in the coming posts, result of my customer interactions and discussions.

Importantly, multiple ways to consume VMware Software across the clouds, be it VVD (Vmware Validated Design, Custom Cloud (BIY) or SDDC vCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) are playing an important role, across on-prem and off-prem .

De-Coupling Hardware and Software

Intelligence driven by the software

Engineered integration of the entire software-defined stack

Software lifecycle management that automates day 0 to day 2 operations